Two New Jersey cops charged with assaulting a man and filing a false police report
Two police officers in Paterson, New Jersey, have been charged with assaulting a man in December 2020 and subsequently lying about their actions in a police report, according to court documents filed Tuesday by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of New Jersey. Court documents allege the officers threw the man to the ground and struck him repeatedly, and falsely claimed in their report that he had been "acting belligerent" and had struck an officer first.
Paterson Police Department Officers Kevin Patino, 29, and Kendry Tineo-Restituyo, 28, first met the alleged victim at approximately 12:30 a.m. on December 14 after handling an unrelated call about a suspicious person, the complaint says.
The pair allegedly drove up to the man, stopped the car, and began assaulting him, the complaint said. Patino is accused of grabbing the victim and striking him in the face and body "numerous times" before Tineo-Restituyo allegedly grabbed the man and threw him to the ground. The man has not been publicly identified.
The complaint notes that the man "attempted to separate himself" from the pair, but does not mention any conduct that would have provoked a violent response.
"While the victim was on the ground, defendants PATINO and TINEO repeatedly struck the victim," the complaint alleges, noting that surveillance camera footage of the event from a nearby business confirms accounts of the incident from other sources. The video has not been released publicly.
The victim "suffered multiple injuries to his head and face" as a result of the attack, the complaint said.
But in a police report summarizing the event that was written by Patino and signed by Tineo-Restituyo, the officers lied multiple times about what transpired, the complaint said. Patino allegedly wrote that the victim approached the officers while "screaming profanities" and "acting belligerent," and hit Patino in the chest area with a closed first — all of which was false, the complaint said.
While Patino mentions in the report that he took the victim to the ground and placed him in handcuffs, he omits that he and Tineo-Restituyo struck him while he was on the ground, the complaint added.
Patino and Tineo-Restituyo are both charged with depriving a victim of his Constitutional right to be free from the use of unreasonable force by law enforcement officers and with filing a false police report. The civil rights violation is punishable by up to 10 years in prison, and the false records charge is punishable by up to 20 years, with a maximum fine of $250,000 for each of the charges.
The Paterson Police Department said its spokesperson was not available for comment. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of New Jersey said Patino has already surrendered and Tineo-Restituyo is expected to surrender later Tuesday.
An attorney for Patino told CBS News that he is confident the legal process "will vindicate" his client and show "that his actions, based on the totality of what transpired that night, were appropriate." An attorney for Tineo-Restituyo said his team would comment on the matter at the appropriate time in court.
The charges come amid a national reckoning over police brutality, wherein the legitimacy of police accounts of interactions with the public has come under scrutiny in some cases. After former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin was charged in the death of George Floyd, for example, the Minneapolis Police Department faced criticism for how its original statement describing Floyd's death compared to a 17-year-old onlooker's video of the interaction and to the details that emerged during the trial.
